Eunhong Lee, a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy, successfully defended her dissertation on July 28. She will be joining the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College this August as a Clinical Ethics Postdoctoral Fellow.
Title: "Beyond Fittingness: A Pragmatic Defense of Emotional Rationality"
Advisor: John Brunero
Abstract:
This dissertation defends a broader conception of emotional rationality than the one that dominates current philosophical debate. Understanding rationality as responsiveness to normative reasons, I argue that emotions belong within the space of reasons, but that the reasons to which they answer are more diverse, and the normative claims those reasons make more temporally structured, than prevailing fittingness-based accounts allow. The project comprises three papers.
The first, "In Defense of Pragmatic Reasons for Emotions," challenges the orthodox view that only fitting reasons—considerations that make an emotion appropriate to its object—can be genuine reasons for emotion. I reconstruct and rebut three arguments that dismiss pragmatic considerations as the "wrong kind" of reason: that responding emotionally to pragmatic reasons is psychologically impossible, that such considerations justify only attempts to induce emotions, and that genuine reasons must refer to the emotion's object. Their failure clears the ground for a pluralistic account on which both fitting and pragmatic considerations can justify emotions.
The second, "The Rationality of Traumatic Emotions," applies this framework to trauma and persistent grief. Against the views that traumatic emotions are merely arational reactions or inherently irrational dysfunctions, I argue that they respond to evaluative appraisals and so are proper objects of rational assessment. That an emotion is classified as a disorder or disrupts ordinary functioning does not establish that it is contrary to reason; the clinical and the normative questions can come apart.
The third, "Emotional Fittingness over Time and the Form of Emotions," addresses why grief can fittingly diminish though the loss persists. I argue that a reason's normative claim has three dimensions—presence, intensity, and form—and that changes in an agent's practical identity alter the form of fitting response without any change in the underlying evaluative fact.
Together the papers defend an agent-involving conception of emotional rationality: to feel well is not only to feel when and as much as feeling is called for, but to feel in a form that honestly acknowledges what one's situation has become.
